


These Ten Years

by cognomen



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Character Study, Complete, Eos in darkness, M/M, Mentions of First Time, Partially set while Noctis is in the crystal I guess, Porn With Plot, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-15 16:40:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16067129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: Gladiolus makes his steps heavy on the stairs, now. Ignis doesn’t like the fuss, but he has yet to protest aloud. He’s done with being fussed over, and not in a generous enough mood to admit he could tell Gladio’s steps by the rhythm and weight of them before he was blind. Now they sound heavy, deliberate.“Gladio,” he says, hand staying steady on his work. “If you’re staying for dinner, I hope you’ve brought something to stretch the pot.”Gladio’s steps hesitate. Ignis hasn’t ever been able to shake his instinct to look at who he’s speaking to, so he orients himself appropriately.“Maybe not to sweeten the pot,” Gladio says, moving in Ignis’ awareness. Of late, Ignis has had trouble locating fresh ingredients. The Hunters no longer seek wild beasts, if any remain out there in the darkness of the plains. “But it should do something to sweeten up the chef.”





	These Ten Years

[PRELUDE]

Gladio picks the frames up off the ground. They are a wreckage; broken glass, delicate shape twisted at one temple and bent. In the disaster and aftermath of the Hydrean’s rage, the Empire’s driving spurs put to her flanks and the dark deeds covered up by the commotion, it would be easy to lose these in the result.

Almost as easy as losing the man they belong to. Gladio is determined to carry both out again. His intimacy with the shape—a dozen images of the frames with the glass still in them, resting peacefully on the nightstand of a number of hotel rooms flood his thoughts—helps him pick them out of the rest of the rubble. He holds the remains in his hands and feels like the whole world is more fragile than he’d think.

He tucks them into his pocket, and returns to the room where they’re trying to restore the mechanics of their owner. He hopes the glasses will be easier.

-

[LATER]

Gladiolus makes his steps heavy on the stairs, now. Ignis doesn’t like the fuss, but he has yet to protest aloud. He’s done with being fussed over, and not in a generous enough mood to admit he could tell Gladio’s steps by the rhythm and weight of them before he was blind. Now they sound heavy, deliberate.

“Gladio,” he says, hand staying steady on his work. “If you’re staying for dinner, I hope you’ve brought something to stretch the pot.”

Gladio’s steps hesitate. Ignis hasn’t ever been able to shake his instinct to look at who he’s speaking to, so he orients himself appropriately.

“Maybe not to sweeten the _pot_ ,” Gladio says, moving in Ignis’ awareness. Of late, Ignis has had trouble locating fresh ingredients. The Hunters no longer seek wild beasts, if any remain out there in the darkness of the plains. “But it should do something to sweeten up the chef.”

There is the faint, hollow sound that Ignis hasn’t heard in years. Soft and sonorous, a hiss of pressure releasing from a newly unsealed can.

“Found it out there at one of the abandoned rest stops,” Gladio explains.

The dark-rich scent of black coffee, which floods Ignis with an almost visceral, tangible memory. The coffee had started to vanish from the shelves just after Insomina fell. The blockade has long since faltered and faded—as has the whole world. The supply chains never resumed, and there are no official ones at all these days.

“Still good,” Gladio says, closer now.

“Past the best-by date, I suppose,” Ignis laments, as if it makes any difference.

Gladio presses the can into Ignis’ hand, and it’s blissfully cool. He takes it to his mouth, and the flavor summons up memories like Noctis used to pull Titan himself from the earth.

The feel of the Regalia’s firm leather seat at his back and the wheel at his command, smooth and clean under his fingers while the sun-warmed air went past.

If in your memories a shrine was built around those things past that you couldn’t possess anymore, this lived up to the hubris. Idol-delicious. It tastes good, like the good days.

“You can stay,” Ignis decides, with his hand curled possessively around the can.

“I knew it would work,” Gladio's warm breath brushes Ignis’ cheek before his mouth does, in a soft kiss.

“I don’t suppose you found more than one?”

“I’ll keep my eyes open.”

-

[THEN]

The moment they give up is long in arriving. They drag on past hope in the demon-crawling city, lingering at the edge of the crystal’s light.

Izunia makes no return, nor does Noctis, and they wait past sanity.

When they leave at last, it is dim outside, like the light has curled away into the crystal to hide.

“Dark out,” Gladio observes, a low mutter meant to disguise his dread, holding it close to his chest.

“LIke it’s about to storm,” Prompto agrees. Ignis knows this is for his benefit. His vision has squeezed down to one burned out pupil, like a pinhole through a plate for viewing solar events. In light, he sees whiteness. In dark, nothing. Now it’s dusky and grey, the same as an angry stormcloud.

“I know this may be a really stupid question,” Prompto says, his tone tight and anxious. “But should we try calling him?”

“Hmm,” Gladio says. “Can’t hurt.”

As the phone rings against Prompto’s ear, something soft and crumbling drifts against Ignis’ cheek. It feels like snow, except it isn’t cold. Ignis reaches up and the substance flakes and smears under his fingertips, leaving an oily smudge on his cheek.

“Voicemail,” Prompto says, quietly.

-

[NOW]

He’s never sure what time it is anymore. What once was intuitive—at least between the dawn and the dusk—is now featureless and dark to deepness regardless of the hour his PHS might have read him, if any power could be spared from the lights to keep it charged.

He’s learned to live by feel—going out to fight when he feels antsy, without ever needing to go far. When he’s tired, he sleeps, trying not to be cognizant of the phantom ring of light behind one eyelid. If he’s hungry, he cooks, eats. There’s little room for gusto anymore, but he holds onto civilization where he can and hoards his dried herbs far more conservatively than his gil in the beginning, when gil were still worth anything.

His rhythm matches Gladio's in subconscious harmony. Gladio comes to him with an apatite, and finds Ignis already cooking. They drift together and apart in unpredictable ways, otherwise. Gladio orbits wide, comes back with the last remains of food from another era. Ignis moves in smaller rings, but he’s a fair hand at finding the few plants that remain by their green smell, trying not to drown in the gray.

By extension to this arrangement, when the food’s done, Ignis begins to _expect—_

“It’s still amazing what you can do with canned rations, Iggy.”

“It hardly makes me miss having fresh food any less.”

—they both feel the gravitational pull of bed.

Washing in a basin takes the worst of the day off, and sleeping beneath the same blankets is the best way to stay warm. Gladio slings an arm over Ignis’ middle and frames himself against his back. His breathing takes a long time to slows.

“Can’t sleep?”

“Hard to, with all these bright lights through the window.”

“Far worse if they weren’t there.”

“I know that,” Gladio grumbles, a rush of warm air against Ignis’ neck. “Logic doesn’t make me sleep better.”

Ignis supposes he understands. “Sometimes, it’s hard to sleep because it’s always dark.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Gladio says, soft and thoughtful.

“I wouldn’t have guessed, either.” Ignis settles closer against him, feeling his slow, even breaths. For a time they’re both quiet. Unsleeping.

“Hey, Iggy,” Gladio mumbles, soft. “When was the first time we slept together?”

Ignis does his best not to sound _too_ dry when he responds, “In what manner?”

Gladio chuckles, squeezes his strong forearm tighter around Ignis’ waist, his broad palm spreading wide and low over his belly, flexing his fingers from tame contact to something more suggestive. “Whichever you want to remember. Wasn’t that around the same time, anyway?”

“Things far enough in the past all seem to be around the same time.”

“Right,” Gladio purrs, his hand sinking lower in daring. “But I remember…”

“Your tent got rained out,” Ignis says, as Gladio works the catch of his button loose, and tugs the tucked-in shirt untucked. It slides against Ignis’ skin with the guilty feeling of cloth too long unclean. “You pitched your tent under a dry waterfall.”

“Wasn’t dry the whole time.”

“Not after it started raining.”

“Hmm.” Gladio eases his fingers under the waistband of Ignis’ pants and against the stirring, heated skin beneath. His fingers are rough with callouses that he knows how to use to best effect. It curls heat under Ignis’ skin, pulls hardness from his core to his extremes and quickness into his breath.

“But,” Ignis sighs, reaching back to pull Gladio's hips against his, grinding his ass against the answering bulge in Gladio's pants, “that wasn’t the first time we did this. “

“That was _after_.”

-

[THEN]

A hotel room. Separate for once, to give Noctis some privacy to grieve. The anger and loss is raw and tangible, and Ignis can’t cover up the image of the ruined city with even the rain-soaked landscape his eyes are actually on, through the anemic window. He wonders if it will ever stop raining again.

“Stop sulking,” Gladio's voice rattles harshly against Ignis’ awareness. It feels like needles under his skin.

“I have every right to.”

“It won’t do anyone any good.”

“It’s—”

Ignis wheels on him, angry with his seeming callousness, with his infallible forward momentum when by all rights he has just as much reason to be ground flat beneath the same grief and uncertainty.

“It’s bullshit,” Gladio says, his yellow eyes piercing into Ignis’ gaze.

“It’s gone, Gladio,” Ignis snarls. “All of it. The future is changed irreparably.”

“That’s not for _us_ to worry about.”

Ignis could hit him. _Should_ , maybe.

Instead, Gladio grabs him unresisting by the lapels and hauls him forward, chest to chest. “We do what he needs us to.”

Before Ignis can answer, Gladio hauls their mouths together, desperate and toothsome and it’s not what Ignis would have ever requested, but it’s what he needs.

It devolves from there, into biting and clawing clothes off of each other, shoving until they both wind up in bed where the frustration can burn off as excess heat and the comfort of closeness can hold the rest at bay.

Ignis stops pushing, then. Figures no matter which way this goes, it’s his way. Gladio's mouth fixes over the bare pulse point in his neck and marks, and Ignis’ nails catch at the warm, firm skin on Gladio’s shoulders in a warning that isn’t heeded.

“If you leave a mark—”

“No one will notice.” Gladio's voice sends a low surge of interest through Ignis’ body, a pulse through his veins to his dick that there’s no point denying when Gladio's fist is curled around it.

“ _I’ll_ notice.”

“Maybe I want you to.”

Ignis figures it for a point of pride. A way of marking conquests and then Gladio pinches with his teeth and does something clever with his thumb and it grounds Ignis so firmly in the here and now that a noise tears out of him, low and helpless.

“I admit,” he pants, letting his own hands fall against the headboard over his head, wrist in the opposite palm in a gesture of surrender, “I always wondered if you knew what you were doing.”

Ignis absorbs the chuckled response with his skin, the warm sound a low thrill in his body before Gladio descends to catch his teeth on Ignis’ sternum, along the curve of his belly and lower.

“Busybody,” Gladio accuses.

“I never _asked._ ”

The answer is an inarticulate sound made against a very intimate part of Ignis’ eager anatomy, just before all the heat and fire of Gladio’s mouth pulls his cock deep without hesitation. It’s electric-sweet and hurried, and they both forget for that moment (and sometimes, again, moments afterwards in hotels and pitched tents scattered across the landscape.)

In the morning, Ignis is bruised, tooth-marked and stretched wrong but well, and Gladio's prediction proves true—only he noties. There is too much else for the Prince to carry, regardless of how much they all try to pick up for him.

-

[NOW]

By now, he knows Gladio by feel, by touch and sound and sensation. There is a strength in his arms and a softness where his belly presses against Ignis’ back.

“Seems fitting,” Gladio observes, his hands working the zipper of Ignis’ pants to give himself more space. They are too old and overworn _and_ —Ignis thinks wryly— _out of style_.

“That every time something momentous happens between us, there’s a world-wide catastrophe?” Ignis asks, already tired of the tentative way Gladio’s hands are moving. He has a tedious fascination with consent that—in another world—had pleased Ignis. Here it just seems ponderous.

“No, just…” Gladio reaches down instead of finishing the sentence and gives another palm-over to Ignis’ cock.

Ignis grunts rudely, and then takes over shoving his undone pants off his own hips. “I take your meaning.”

There is an interminable pause where they negotiate space on the bunk, where Ignis undoes the buttons on Gladio’s shirt—it _has_ gotten cold in the dark—and peels back his layers. Gladio reaches up at last when Ignis has him on his back, scars and warmth under his palms. The weight of the new glasses lifts from Ignis’ nose.

“You still forget these.”

“Even easier now.”

Gladio’s hand returns to Ignis’ face, cups against his cheek with his palm, and his rough thumb brushes over the scars there, the ruined eyelid.

“Why do you wear them?”

“Vanity,” Ignis lies. His face feels more wrong without them than _with_ , and—”I know you’re the one that had them fixed.”

“Well,” Gladio’s hand trails down over Ignis’ chest, over his belly. Curls around his cock at last and gives a real stroke, even as Ignis rolls his hips into it impatiently. “You needed them.”

Ignis rifles the crate that serves as his bedside table, a catch-all for the detritus of life. The things that move with him, forgotten in his hands until they are set down. His usual impeccable neatness has ground down to a patient nub under the constant friction of practicality and necessity. He still finds the lubricant in there where he expects it.

“Here,” he offers, having learned the hard way that it is extremely difficult to negotiate the bottle by feel and not spill it everywhere.

Gladio has no contrite comment for once. His breathing has gone quick with Ignis sitting over his hips—goes quicker still when Ignis curls both hands around the girth of his cock and strokes upwards. After two such motions, a cool, thick liquid pours over Ignis’ hands and he works it in, easing friction. He can feel the passage of every inch of warm, slick skin between his fingers and palms and satisfies himself when there is no portion of it unwet; no grab and catch of opposing skin.

Then he sits up on his knees and lets Gladio pay his body the same attention; his blunt fingers well-coated, palming behind Ignis’ balls with a broad, indelicate swath of slick against the thin skin there before abandoning this to ease Ignis open.

At first it had been difficult. Igis had to pry the knack of accepting this intrusion out of himself. Apply pleasure by blunt means—first, only Gladio’s fingers as he made a show of it being for his own sake that he avoided Ignis’ tightness.

Finally, like today, Ignis took the matter under direct control

“I’m ready,” he warns.

“You sure?” Gladio shifts the two fingers he has inside Ignis. “Feels tight, still.”

Ignis has gone past arguing that with fingers—and other appendages—as large as Gladio’s it would _always_ feel tight. He knows Gladio would wish for a world where there was time enough to lay Ignis completely open at his leisure. There are other virtues such a world implies that means Ignis might even let him. They do not live in that world, now.

“Help, or get out of my way.” Ignis says, and it sounds a little more sour than intended.

Gladio opts to help, settling his hands on Ignis’ hips as he rides down onto Gladio’s cock; a moment of blunt refusal by his body,a s if the head of Gladio’s cock too much purchase to penetrate, then Ignis shifts his hips and presses and the resistance bursts and sinks and they both gasp at the sudden depth and size of it.

“Iggy,” Gladio says, soft and a little lost, but still concerned. “We can go—”

Ignis drives his hips down until he’s taken all of it and forces Gladio to swallow his words to a similar depth.

“Or not,” Gladio gasps. “How do you _do_ that?”

“Not,” Ignis agrees. How he does it is his own concern. “You’ve already stretched my patience.”

Gladio reaches up, smears damp palms over Ignis’ back and onto his shoulders. It’s a soft motion. “Guess it’s time to stretch the rest of you.”

His body goes tense. IGnis feels it but instead of resisting, he goes soft. He lets Gladio roll them on the bed for leverage, pushing Ignis’ back into the mattress and reclaiming the inches their bodies have parted with a forceful shove of his hips.

It’s exactly what Ignis wants, raking over his senses with a heavy, full, deep touch. It unmuffles things, for an instant. Ignis heard your other senses get sharper—a platitude that Prompto was especially fond of—when you lost one.

Touch has sharpened and changed for him; become more real. It’s contact that moves him from isolation now. The differences in it render the personalities of others to him.

Ignis reaches up and gets his hands into Gladio’s lengthening hair and _feels_ him, the reality and connection of him through his surging hips. For the time, he lets  it carry him away. At first rough, quick, and then when Gladio’s hand curls around Ignis’ cock and brings him over, Gladio takes for himself a slow, leisurely pace. He never needs urgency to cum, instead emptying himself out with a sweet, low sound like he could do it any time.

-

[THEN]

Gladio has an effortless recovery time, aided by his shameless willingness to go out into the world half-assembled. It’s part of how he’s constructed his look, to be as casual as possible.

It’s a boon when, after the first three times Prompto assaults them with his presence—

“You guys they put cluckatrice on _waffles_ here! For breakfast! Ignis you have to come see—whoa! What happened to you?”

—”Rise and shine! We have a wild chocobo to… oh no, _again?_ ”

—”Hey, Gladio, Can I borrow a—nope! Oh no! Sorry!”—

Gladio volunteers to intercept Prompto and Noct in the mornings while Ignis puts himself back together. Noctis is far less of an issue, aside from the occasional observation that he’d gotten to breakfast before Ignis, for once.

It irks him, until Gladio puts his hand in the center of Ignis’ back in the light of sunrise and presses a kiss to the back of his neck, reminding. “We all deserve at least one luxury.”

It’s hardly that, so much as time to wash and brush his teeth and all the rest of the presentational matters that he won’t forget now that he’s not at court in Insomnia. (Now that there _is_ no court in Insomnia, a little traitorous voice in him reminds.) If they want to think of that as granting him a luxury, well…

Gladio is right. They all need allowances. Let this concession to the past be his.

-

[THE END]


End file.
